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Feather report: Choughed Cornwall

Derwent May

August 20 2011, 1:01am, The Times

There are not many red-billed choughs (pronounced “chuffs”) in Britain, but with luck you can see some as you sit outside a café, with a crab sandwich or cream tea in front of you, at the southernmost point of the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has a telescope there, through which you can often watch them swirling round the cave where they nest.

They are lively black birds, not unlike their relatives the jackdaws, but with a long, sharp red beak, and a way of flying with their wing feathers well spread. They became extinct in Cornwall in 1947. But in 2001, three of them appeared on the Lizard peninsula. The RSPB, along with Natural England and the…

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